quotations about belief
Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
Belief was immune to logic; it operated by its own laws.
JAMES SIEGEL
Detour
Just as every man must see for himself, so every man must believe for himself. Acceptation of truth is a purely personal, individual act.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Telling
Maturity of mind is best shown in slow belief.
BALTASAR GRACIAN
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
So easy are men to be drawn to believe any thing, from such men as have gotten credit with them; and can with gentleness and dexterity take hold of their fear and ignorance.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.
RAY BRADBURY
The October Country
The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
If what we worship fail us, still the fire
Burns on, and it is much to have believed.
AMY LOWELL
"Hero-Worship"
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook L", Aphorisms
Where is the world whose people don't prefer a comfortable, warm, and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation and Earth
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
It will be whatever it is, no? Nothing, something -- our believing one thing or another will matter not at all in the end.
SCOTT SMITH
The Ruins
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Price of the Ticket
Men that believe only what they understand can write their creed on a postage stamp.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.
WILLIAM JAMES
"What Pragmatism Means,", Pragmatism
I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Wise Blood
We are trained to believe and not to know.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
The more we justify our beliefs, the more narrow-minded we become.
LIN YUTANG
The Importance of Living